Chances are good that if you’re an attorney you’ve had one of the big 3 yellow page companies calling and showing up in your office trying to sell you some combination of a website, online advertising and phonebook advertising. Dex Media, Hibu and AT&T are in the hurt locker and their phonebook business is all but dead. (In fact, Dex Media recently emerged from their 3rd bankruptcy in the last 7 years in August, 2016 (*Updated May, 2017). IYP, (Internet Yellow Pages), is an industry with little growth - besides the dollars they migrate from clients ready to cancel their print ads… But that’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul. They need a growth mechanism and their only hope is online.

In their heyday, lawyer advertising was around 20% of yellow page revenue. The only way you could find a lawyer pre-Internet was in the trusty phonebook. Then around 2005, businesses started getting up and walking away from phonebook advertising, but the yellow page industry was ill-equipped to replace the print revenue with online dollars.

Below are probably the 5 best reasons you should not get involved with a yellow page company when it comes to marketing your law firm online.

Yellow page companies have practiced for decades on the following business model: 1) Get a contract, 2) Print an ad, 3) Not talk to you again for 12 months until it’s time to renew, 4) Make it difficult to cancel. The Internet doesn’t work that way, but they’ve tried to adapt that model to their website marketing business channels. Furthermore, the contract the client is required to sign makes it impossible, (or extremely inconvenient) to ever leave their service. Most of the time they register the domain and host your website, which basically means you've given them the keys to your castle and paid them to take it. If you ever want to leave it will probably be easier to launch a new website on a new address than attempt to part from them amicably.

You’ll probably never see an attorney’s website on page 1 that was developed by a yellow page company. It’s easy to tell, just look at the bottom of any page 1 ranking lawyer’s website and you’ll see who developed the site - it won’t be a yellow page company. Yellow page companies are terrible at attorney search engine optimization, they don’t have the expertise, patience or infrastructure.

You’ll probably never see a yellow page company’s website on page 1 for a lawyer search, (yellowpages.com, superpages.com, yellowbook.com). If they can’t optimize their own website for an attorney search, what makes you think they’ll be successful for your firm? Yellow page companies are after recurring revenue. So, the most scalable online service they can offer that will produce monthly revenue is Pay-Per-Click (PPC). That brings us to number four.

If you’re a lawyer in even a mildly competitive market, an effective Google AdWords program will run you upwards of thousands of dollars per month. The moment you turn off the cash faucet, your ad disappears from Google and so do you. Also, the Internet is full of websites that have client reports about how their money was misspent on PPC by yellow pages and never refunded because of their business model (see #1 above). Just do a search for any yellow page company + the word “ripoff”. If it were a handful of crazy people that would be easy to dismiss, but it’s literally THOUSANDS of business owners.

Yellow page companies don’t specialize in lawyer marketing. The same guy you talked to for 15 minutes about how you want your website designed just talked to a plumber, roofer and dentist earlier that day. How do they know what will be effective for an attorney if that’s not their expertise?

*May 2017 UPDATE: There should be a #6 on this list that was an oversight which was recently brought to my attention by a subscriber.

6. Boiler plate design & content. Yellow page companies don't just recycle their phonebooks, they recycle the same website content and designs over and over again. An article from New Zealand reveals that the local YP provider just copy and pasted the same website for 3 different customers, only changing the logo and contact information. While I haven't seen this egregious degree of fraud happening in the US, after visiting numerous YP produced websites you'll immediately notice that they all have the same general layout, stock photography, generalized content and look & feel.

Hopefully you’re finding this article before signing a contract with a yellow page company and not reading this and mentally checking off all the things that happened to you. If you are in need of a website proctology exam, your best bet is to find a local attorney marketing expert if you're not sold on the idea of hiring one of the large legal marketing mills.

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